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Celebrating Martin Luther King Day

Like most schools across the United States, we’re off today in observance of the life and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A new edition of What’s Going On in This Picture? will be available early next Monday.

Although we have many, many resources in our ever-growing M.L.K. Day collection, this year we want to highlight one in particular, an essay
that appeared in The New York Times Magazine in September.

… We returned to King’s letter, in which he draws a distinction between just and unjust laws. They didn’t know about this King, I found, the one who fought the law. In their view, the civil
rights movement was embodied in King the Christlike leader, who stands for peace, love and brotherhood.

I told the students that King went to jail a lot for peace, love and brotherhood.

We talked about Baltimore, where the police had just killed Freddie Gray and street protests were swelling to an uprising. My students were skeptical of headlines and commentary that called for nonviolent protest.
One of the students noted that the police were violent, too, and they were placing people in mortal danger just to protect some buildings from being damaged.

“A building is not more valuable than a person,” she said. Most of the others nodded in agreement. More began to speak. The rote discussion was becoming impassioned, cacophonous:

“But there’s a difference between rioting and peaceful protest. …”

“Are we saying property is more valuable than a human being?”

“That’s like saying to protest is unlawful. …”

“What does ‘peaceful’ even mean?”

Read about the rest of the discussion that day, and think about the implications for your own classroom. How does teaching about Dr. King and the civil rights movement look different in the era of Ferguson,
Mo., Freddie Gray and the Black Lives Matter movement?

Do you have to be disobedient if you want justice? How would your students answer?

Here are a few more resources that look at Dr. King in the context of civil rights struggles today: